recently the laptop of my sis had some problems with windows that it could not access the bootpartition of drives connected via SATA properly, so it was bluescreening always on start. We tried to reinstall Windows but without success. So we went with Linux, where we got further, but in the end of the installation it failed as well (that was the moment when we found out about the problem with the bootpartiton). After some testing i figured out it is a SATA problem. We decided to install Linux on a external SSD (which maybe is slower, but makes the computer usable). And you never know what could happen and I just wonder, what would happen if we accedentaly unplug the external SSD via USB while the computer is running. Would it just crash, or would sth worse happen? Thanks for your help!
2 Answers
The likelihood is it would crash and/or it could run for a while but you could loose work and not realise until its to late.
It is unlikely (but not impossible) that you could cause the filesystem to become corrupt. Unlikely because most Linux filesystem's do Journalling or are simple and recovery paths are well known.
It depends on the Linux: Some versions shut down the computer if the root filesystem becomes disconnected. Others may just hang in a loop writing messages about disk I/O errors. Really good system may even be able to recover when the SSD is reconnected soon (within a minute).
It also depends on the filesystems being used: Journalled filesystems can be recovered to a consistent state (which does not mean you won't have data loss), while other filesystems may get corrupted into a state where they are not recoverable (automatically).
I could also depend on the SSD and the configuration: If the memory block size of the SSD does not match the block size of the filesystem, a complete block on the SSD could get corrupted when the SSD is disconnected (which also means the SSD looses power, right?).
